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The first issue of Gay Community News was released, edited by Tonie Walsh and Catherine Glendon and designed by Niall Sweeney.
Seven issues in, GCN was redesigned by Niall Sweeney. With ‘gay’ in the top left corner, we were out and proud.
A year later, designer Annabel Konig reimagined the brand, with the word ‘gay’ expanding to become a logo in itself.
Designed by Sandy Campbell and Richard Prenderville, and edited by Francis Thackaberry, the new look aimed to reflect a broadsheet newspaper.
With new design and branding from Maurice Farrell, Gay Community News was abbreviated to GCN for the first time. Aengus Carroll was then editor.
With rebranding by Fionán Healy, GCN went full colour, and changed format becoming a ‘magaloid’, a cross between magazine and tabloid.
“GCN may have changed, but fundamentally it’s the same,” declared editor Brian Finnegan as a new branding was launched, designed again by Fionán Healy.
Designer Dave Darcy rebranded the magazine for its big relaunch, introducing the modern GCN, with editor Lisa Connell currently at the helm.
When GCN enquired about advertising on 2FM it was told that this would not be possible, lest RTE be seen as ‘advocating illegal activity’.
Founded in December 1984 and bankrolled in the main by the National Gay Federation (NGF), Out was Ireland’s first attempt at a commercially mainstream gay periodical, following in a long line of publications stretching back to 1975.
Distributed by Eason’s, who only three years earlier refused to stock any publication with the words gay or lesbian on the front cover, the A4 magazine achieved more widespread penetration than any previous publication. Nell McCafferty was a regular columnist and throughout its four year history the bi- monthly magazine laid claim to some of the best of Ireland’s queer writers, designers and photographers.
When the first AIDS deaths were notified in 1985, the Dáil delayed five years before discussing the horror in our midst.
RTÉ’s attitudinising was typical of Irish government and civil society’s studied disengagement from Ireland’s sexual minorities. When the first AIDS deaths were notified in 1985, the Dáil delayed five years before discussing the horror in our midst; a Fine Gael Minister for Youth declined to launch the world’s 2nd International Gay Youth Conference at Dublin’s Hirschfeld Centre, using the same get-out clause as RTÉ; the Department of Health was advised by the Attorney General not to fund a reprint of Gay Health Action’s AIDS information leaflets; and although Senator David Norris succeeded in 1988 at Strasbourg’s European Court of Human Rights, the government dragged its feet for a further five years before finally repealing all hateful anti-gay legislation.
When Out’s printers, The Carlow & Leinster Times, refused to print its penultimate issue due to what they considered an ‘offensive’ safer sex ad, the magazine’s operation was thrown into chaos.
In common with other previous publications, North and South, Out magazine was perennially under-capitalised and struggled to acquire advertising in a socially and economically hostile environment. When its printers, The Carlow & Leinster Times, refused to print its penultimate issue due to what they considered an ‘offensive’ safer sex ad, the magazine’s operation was thrown into chaos. It never fully recovered and published its last edition in September 1988.
Gay Community News was first proposed in 1986. Its original A3 newsprint format and mix of reportage was much influenced by Gay News (London), Boston’s own Gay Community News and The Body Politic (Toronto), the latter one of the most significant, queer co-operative publishing ventures of the 1980s.
Slated for publication on Christmas 1987, production was pushed off-course by the death on August 7th of one of its co- founders, Catherine Glendon, NGF general secretary. Three months later, the Hirschfeld Centre, Dublin’s LGBT community centre and NGF headquarters, was irrevocably damaged by fire, at a stroke cutting off the magazine’s potential funding stream.
With eventual publication mooted for St. Brigid’s Day and operating on a budget of IR£300 (€380), GCN finally appeared off the presses of The Meath Chronicle on February 10th, 1988.
On a number of occasions, the main gay bars of Dublin, The George and The Parliament Inn, refused to stock the publication, as did PoD dance club, the latter having taken umbrage at an acidic club review.
The paper ploughed on, benefitting hugely from progressive buy-in by readers and contributors, typified by the inclusion of Munster and Connaught supplements.
Government work schemes, initiated in 1989, became ever more ambitious with the advent of decriminalisation in 1993 and the roll-out of social inclusion policies. While operating from the top floor of Dublin’s new community centre, Outhouse, the paper had a staff of 30, employed as much in self-discovery and community building as in learning new skills in art direction, journalism, photography, illustration and the development of desktop publishing.
GCN teamed up with club promoter, Cormac Cashman, to run a weekly club night, Mother, that has become a queer social institution in the intervening eight years since its inception at Dublin’s Arlington Hotel.
Advertising also boomed during The Septic Tiger years, facilitating the move to full colour art covers.
On the eve of the millennium, the newspaper had a major overhaul, displaying much cleaner graphic design and increased spot colour. Moving to a new office in Temple Bar in 2001, the ending of community employment schemes was reflected in a much reduced staff and greater urgency in tapping the mythical pink euro.
Issue 165, published in 2003, saw a radical redesign from newspaper to ‘magloid’. Significant funding from Atlantic Philanthropies led to a jump in confidence as GCN repositioned itself to compete in an increasingly commercial market and disruptive digital news platforms. Lifestyle ads and eating out columns echoedthe aspirational, consumerist desires of the population at large.
Into the second decade of the millennium, the magazine got another makeover as a more user-friendly A4 magazine. Mainstream media began to increasingly pick up its lead stories.
The Great Recession so impacted the magazine’s advertising stream, knocking on average €4K off each issue, the magazine launched its GCN Forever fundraising campaign in 2010. It also teamed up with club promoter, Cormac Cashman, to run a weekly club night, Mother, that has become a queer social institution in the intervening eight years since its inception at Dublin’s Arlington Hotel.
The most recent iteration of the magazine, printed on surplus Irish Water bill paper stock, was relaunched with great fanfare at Pantibar in July 2017.
Mother’s largesse has plugged a small part of the hole left when Atlantic Philantrophies wound down its subvention. It also serves as a reminder of the fraught nature of niche print publishing, something the magazine recently addressed - again - when it launched the Q card, an amped-up subscribers’ loyalty card.
The most recent iteration of the magazine, printed on surplus Irish Water bill paper stock, was relaunched with great fanfare at Pantibar in July 2017.
With increased pagination and a slew of guest contributors, the magazine conveys newly energised political and cultural reportage through an elegantly sexy, pared- back visual aesthetic and with a quiet confidence redolent of its justifiable position, after thirty years, as the Irish queer paper of record.
When the tabloid eventually saw light of day, Glendon was dead and the NGF’s headquarters had been torched. For the first year of operation, the newspaper was published from the Dublin Northside offices of Senator David Norris, recently appointed as Ireland’s first openly gay parliamentarian. Lacking funds, it was a simple production using NGF’s sole typewriter and outsourced typesetting. Niall Sweeney, a 2nd year graphic designer at IADT, created the masthead and art directed the publication in its first year. Judith Storm of the National Transvestite Line delivered the layout boards to GCN’s printers, The Meath Chronicle, in Navan.
A year on, as GCN eventually moved back into a partially refurbished Hirschfeld Centre, three people were engaged voluntarily in writing and producing the paper. By late 1989, a FÁS community employment scheme allowed the part-time hiring of a larger pool of talent. The impact was immediate, with more extensive reportage and advertising.
The old Temple Bar home was sold in controversial circumstances with a gagging order placed on the newspaper’s employees. Ballard responded by publishing a single explanatory paragraph surrounded by a sea of negative space.
Managing editor John Bergin, handed over to Francis Thackaberry in July 1990, with 24 people in place, working or contributing to the ten page tabloid. Thackaberry accelerated the development of the paper’s culture section and presided over a year-long wobble when FÁS funding was cut dramatically.
The paper bounced back under the mid ‘90s stewardship of Richie Prenderville, who oversaw the introduction of Voicemail “Connect & Contact’, the nearest thing to a dating app for those who were Nokia-enabled or had access to a landline. Classifieds grew to two full pages and four page supplements were each independently produced by writers and activists in Cork and Galway.
Cathal Kelly became editor in early 1995, and, with office manager Michael McGrane at his side, was perfectly placed to exploit many cultural and economic changes flowing from decriminalisation and the advances of The Septic Tiger.
Two distinct lesbian pages were already an embedded feature at this stage, as was B&W coverage of social events. Spot colour and even the odd full colour photograph appeared with greater frequency, leading to the first full colour art cover in December 1996. Photographed by Eamon Doyle and designed by Niall Sweeney, the cover also acknowledged late 90’s re-appropriation of the word ‘queer’.
Deborah Ballard’s tenure as editor coincided with a move from the Hirschfeld Centre to Dublin’s new LGBT community resource, Outhouse, at South William Street. The old Temple Bar home was sold in controversial circumstances with a gagging order placed on the newspaper’s employees. Ballard responded by publishing a single explanatory paragraph surrounded by a sea of negative space.
She was also responsible for the Mediawatch pages long before she became editor, using her forensic legal eye to scrutinise mainstream print and broadcast media coverage of LGBT issues.
Ballard presided over the centenary issue, published in October 1997, with a wraparound cover featuring thumbnails of all the 100 covers, again designed by Niall Sweeney. Containing an extraordinary range of well-written opinion, this 100 page edition is now rightly considered a collector’s item.
Aengus Carroll oversaw a transformation of the paper a couple of months later. A gorgeous, bold new masthead was designed by Maurice Farrell, and his use of typeface, judicious kerning and more generous negative space created an immediately fresh, uncluttered and elegant publication of 48 pages, ready to embrace whatever lay on the other side of the new millennium.
NLGF co-chair Ailbhe Smyth beautifully enunciated a vision for the 17yr-old publication that would see it ‘developing its contribution to political, intellectual and cultural life in this country generally and to be saying that LGBT issues are everybody’s issues…so that GCN becomes one of the leading, cutting-edge, thinking publications in this country.’
Kerryman and academic, Michael Cronin, assumed a short caretaker editor role before handing over to another long-time staffer, Stephen Mulkearn.
Almost immediately, Mulkearn addressed the unbalanced iconography and editorial of the paper by commissioning production manager, Stephen Meyler, to design for issue 131 the first specifically lesbian cover.
A mission statement, signed by GCN staff, was published in July 2000, in which the magazine declared “we strive to produce a publication that is informative and entertaining, one that will stimulate debate on political issues and reflect the diversity of living experience among gay, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered and transvestite people”.
When Mulkearn stepped down two years later, he was able to announce a significant tranche of funding from Atlantic Philantrophies. Writing in issue 150, he told readers the grant represented “a milestone for the current board of NLGF, who took over the management of GCN in 1999”.
The grant came on the back of strategic planning that took two years work and would secure the newspaper for the medium term. As NLGF co-chair, Ailbhe Smyth, beautifully enunciated a vision for the 17 year-old publication that would see it “developing its contribution to political, intellectual and cultural life in this country generally and to be saying that LGBT issues are everybody’s issues…so that GCN becomes one of the leading, cutting-edge, thinking publications in this country”.
When Mulkearn passed the baton briefly to Marie Mulholland, the publication’s smaller workforce moved to a new, slightly cramped office at Scarlet Row, close to Dublin’s Wood Quay.
Former staffer, Brian Finnegan, who cut his teeth on the publication during its Outhouse newspaper phase, assumed the editor’s job in May 2003. In the intervening years, before assuming his new role, he edited Ireland’s first, glossy gay consumer title, GI or Gay Ireland.
Although aimed primarily at gay men and focussed on mining the fragrant acquisitiveness of The Septic Tiger years, the experience of heading up an unapologetically commercial title, coupled with his long familiarity with GCN, was the perfect fit for the NLGF board and a boon to the Sligo man himself, who began implementing the long-planned changes enabled by Atlantic Philantrophies’ largesse.
Issue 165’s editorial laid out the challenges ahead: “How do you become a sleek, glossy publication competing in the advertising market and continue to speak on a community level?” A statement from the publishers, NLGF, made clear that “GCN has to become financially sustainable and has to remain relevant and interesting to our wide variety of readers. They are not mutually exclusive aims, but the balance is a challenge”.
Here was an acknowledgement of the constant challenge that has faced the magazine since day one: ploughing a route to self-sustainability while being all things to all people, this multifarious Rainbow Society that has carried the publication since 1988 and which has, rightly, developed a sense of collective ownership of the magazine.
Here was an acknowledgement of the constant challenge that has faced the magazine since day one: ploughing a route to self-sustainability while being all things to all people, this multifarious Rainbow Society that has carried the publication since 1988 and which has, rightly, developed a sense of collective ownership of the magazine.
Regular columnist, Stephen Meyler, put it even more succinctly in the 200th edition, published just before the crash. “It’s necessary for GCN to focus much more on crowd-pleasing content, since advertisers, both gay and mainstream, need to be persuaded that their money is best spent here…however, the commercial entity it now is needs to tread a fine line. If it becomes too amenable to the mainstream advertisers, then it risks becoming just another lifestyle magazine”.
“On the other hand,” he offered, “because it will be unlikely to get public funding in the future, being too ‘distinctive’ and therefore relying on ‘gay’ advertisers would deprive it of a lot of possible income”.
As the magazine tried to ride out the Great Recession, it squeezed the magloid format into A4 and used its increased pagination to introduce a load of new features. Simple gestures like the first Garda ad in issue 240 spoke volumes about public perceptions of the magazine’s value and reach, even while some readers cynically dismissed the wall- to-wall coverage of the movement for civil partnership and marriage equality.
GCN documented with great care the myriad dramatic permutations of David Norris’ presidential bid in 2011, typified by a cover feature in issue 259 and an editorial in which Brian Finnegan excoriated some of the mainstream media’s behaviour towards the hopeful candidate. Presciently prefiguring the Pantigate saga by three years, Finnegan called out the homophobia underpinning the treatment meted out to the hapless Senator.
Following the successes of gender recognition and marriage equality legislation in 2015, the magazine responded to its readership survey by introducing new features and ever more varied voices of opinion.
During the 1916 centenary year, GCN was as much focused on queer historiography as new realities shaping Ireland’s future. Discussions on ethnicity, gay Travellers, asylum and immigration, the greying queer demographic, nudity, body dysmorphia and more have graced the magazine in the intervening years.
It may seem like coincidence, but a revamp in 2017 has brought not just cleaner design (by Dave Darcy), but a more acute acknowledgement of pressing political realities, both within Ireland and beyond our shores.
The most remarkable thing about all of this is that it is delivered free every month.
